Honey Heart
T
his girl…her mouth was like…so big and her teeth were so big. I don’t mean that in the cruel way men talk about women’s mouths but in the gay way like her smile ate me up there was a surge of light inside my body and I was in big trouble. I was always talking about the way her face looked like she was so beautiful but you couldn’t tell why. Every time you looked away and looked back something different was standing out as the Most Beautiful Thing, like something under her skin was shifting like her eyes and nose and mouth and eyebrows were all little creatures scuttling around so you couldn’t get a steady image. I was always trying to explain this and people were always telling me it was grotesque. One time I ran into her on campus she was sitting there eating an apple and it was like a Byzantine painting with the gold halo around the head and also like getting hit in the stomach. This was before I knew these feelings were gay feelings so it was just…unexplained godliness.
Sampson killed a lion and then bees built a hive inside its body. He made it into a riddle about sweetness coming from strength. A good butch metaphor for toughness and tenderness maybe, but Sampson was kind of a bad guy who did a lot of killing for a lot of not really murder-worthy reasons. Like Sampson went out and gathered 300 foxes and tied them together by their tails sounds impressive but isn’t so nice for the foxes. Anyway.
My heart’s encrusted with little wax hexagons crawling with the larvae of 300 past crushes. Like one girl smiling on the beach and another one making oatmeal in the morning and that really bad time in high school when I got called into the principal’s office because someone had accused my best friend of being in the KKK but I didn’t stop being in love with her for maybe four or five more months after that. One girl putting on her sunhat and one girl taking off her earrings and one girl cooking me scrambled eggs.
Crush my heart like a hamantaschen in your fist, sick clots of blood running down your fingers like plum jam. When you kiss me on the neck it feels just like when I dreamed you kissed me on the neck.
To call on the Archangel Metatron to reset your body’s geometry you have to imagine a cube of light situated in the centre of your chest and then you imagine your heart which is like the sun of your body shining with light and then the light bursting up through your skull into heaven. Honey heart oozing too much feeling, sacred heart on fire, sun heart shooting light up through the top of the head.
Dip me in honey and throw me to the lesbians ha ha
ha.
About the author
Mira Schlosberg is a writer, comics artist, and editor who makes work about queerness and spirituality. They have been published in The Lifted Brow, Rabbit Poetry Journal, and Seizure, among others, and they were a 2017 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow. Mira is the editor of Voiceworks, edits comics at Scum, and subedits at Gusher. You can find them on Twitter @miraschlosberg
